The old ways aren’t working and the new ways require missteps along the way. That means the English teacher who is still grading based on MLA format needs to join forces with the STE(A)M teacher rallying her students with #SocialJusticeMath so that all of us together can transition our schools into the 21st Century.

It’s going to be the old ways together with the new ways before the new ways take over completely and leave teachers clutching textbooks and five-paragraph essays behind. We still have time. We need to collaborate.

Our students are sprinting into the future. Their Snapchat messages are all emojis and acronyms because they’re in a hurry, they have a lot to do, they are doing everything all at once all of the time. If schools don’t figure out how to meet them where they are, it won’t be our students who are left behind.

Raghava KK spreading big ideas in a small room filled with TED-Ed Innovative Educators and the TED crew. #TEDEdWeekend. December 3, 2016. @leongstagram

2. SCHOOLS CURRENTLY SERVE PARENTS, NOT STUDENTS OR TEACHERS

Spoken word poet Sarah Kay celebrating with her team of TED-Ed Innovators during the Little Bits design challenge at #TEDEdWeekend. December 3, 2016. @leongstagram

Raghava KK (and also this former Administrator of the Year) spoke about how schools do a disservice to students and teachers when planning is parent-centered. I would clarify that the majority of student parents are great, but that schools end up ruled by the three specific kinds of parents that the NAIS defined in their succinctly titled article Parents Who Bully the School.

But bullies shouldn’t be in charge (not of schools, not of countries). Students of all grade levels should be leading their own learning alongside their peers and the trained adults who have committed their professional lives to finding innovative ways to support students in becoming their most capable selves.

IDEAS FOR STUDENT AND TEACHER LEADERSHIP:

Socratic Seminars for student-led assessments that invite students to practice dinner party skills.

Teacher-led Twitter chats such as #TEDEdChat (every Tuesday, 3 PM PST) and #WATeachLead (every other Sunday, 7 PM PST) are amplifying teacher voices and connecting education leaders from all over the world across disciplines and grade levels.

Creativity is traditionally framed as elusive at best, magical at its most unteachable. And yet creativity is perhaps the most highly hailed of all of the 4 Cs as the paramount “21st Century skill” expected of teachers to impart on their students across disciplines and grade levels.

Although magical classrooms are popular to invoke in Teacher Appreciation Week memes, magic is not actually possible to plan for in curriculum development. But curation? That we can plan for. Free social media sites like Pinterest and Instagram make it easy for students to collect, share, and collaborate.

LESSON IDEAS TO INSPIRE STUDENT CREATIVITY THROUGH CURATION:

Design a playlist for a protagonist.

Collect photographs inspired by evolution.

Create a reading list about the 2016 presidential election based on the themes involving gender.

TED-Ed animator Jeremiah Dickey working with the TED-Ed Innovative Educators to bring complicated concepts to life through stop-motion animation. December 4, 2016. @leongstagram

4. IT’S GOING TO TAKE GUTS

Now more than ever it’s a brave act of rebellion and self-preservation just to be ourselves out in public. But this kind of authenticity, more than any professional development on the 4C’s or innovation in the classroom, is what will show our students that we are capable of supporting them as we all navigate this quickly-changing, seemingly illogical world that requires us to continue to think creatively and critically even if our elected leaders appear not to.

That’s me super excited and not freaking out at all before taking the TED stage. December 4, 2016. @leongstagram

As he wrapped up our workshop Raghava left us with a question: “Do we have the guts to live authentically in front of these kids?” I think we do. And I think it’s going to be messy and surprising and we’re going to have to figure it out together as we go.

I’m grateful to be on this TED-Ed team as we do just that. Interested in learning more about disrupting education through ideas worth spreading? Find information about becoming a TED-Ed Innovative Educator here.

Kristin Leong, M.Ed. is a speaker, writer, and Humanities teacher. She once delivered five minute performance at Town Hall Seattle entitled "Nightclub Bartending & Middle School Teaching: A Venn Diagram." She is an advocate for critical thinking across grade levels and student-led classrooms. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter and see videos of her talks at kristinleong.com.

The opinions expressed by the CORElaborate Bloggers, guest bloggers and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of the Puget Sound Educational Service District (PSESD), Ready Washington or any employee thereof. PSESD is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information supplied by the Washington State Teacher Leader or Guest Bloggers.

About Kristin Leong

Kristin Leong, M.Ed. is a speaker, writer, and Humanities teacher. She once delivered five minute performance at Town Hall Seattle entitled "Nightclub Bartending & Middle School Teaching: A Venn Diagram." She is an advocate for critical thinking across grade levels and student-led classrooms. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter and see videos of her talks at kristinleong.com.

Kristin, thanks for sharing! So excited for you around this opportunity. Sounds amazing and like a perfect match for you! Love the energy of the experience and how that comes out through your post. Can’t wait to see you in person and hear more! Glad also to know more about these #TeachersOnFire out there doing amazing things!

I love your ideas/takeaways! It will take bravery for teachers to make those changes, those shifts towards relevant, 21st century education. Making such changes often brings discontent from not just parents but also from the students themselves sometimes! Those students who are on track with traditional schooling, or as one parent put it to me once, “my kid has this school thing all figured out,” they are taken aback when we don’t give them traditional assignments and grade them traditionally whether or not non-traditional learning better prepares them for their futures. It’s hard enough to have to battle “preparing” them for the next grade level or for college but when the kids themselves have had their view of education narrowed, then we really have to be brave. Brave enough to help them see that there is much more to being prepared for their future than textbooks and grades, for example.

A quote book would be excellent! That quote has stuck with me ever since. I see it happen so often. I don’t know for whom I worry more, those who have figured out schooling and are good at it, or those who aren’t good at it yet still trapped by it (and defining their self worth by it!)?

I specifically love the idea of using curation as a creativity opportunity. I can also feel my science/math head trepidate at the idea of grading science in a more subjective manner – it seems like a rubric-ey type project though. I’m going to try and find a place to steal that idea!

It is SO much easier to follow last year’s lesson plan book which followed the year before’s plan book, which followed. . . . I keep reminding myself that students engage deeply when they have voice, choice and an authentic audience. Not much of that stuff showed up in my vintage plan books. When I did try something innovative, I would be so disappointed by the first attempt that I wouldn’t try it again.
I’ve been shaking things up a little this year. My physics students made videos about Newton’s Laws of Motion. Their videos weren’t perfect, but the scientific discourse they had while they were making their films made the project worthwhile. Innovation rarely works on the first attempt–just ask Thomas Edison–and I’m learning to give myself and my students multiple opportunities to learn new skills.

It sounds like this was a radical conference! This post really resonated with me because on so many levels I feel education has become (or always has been) complacent. The ideology that school should be places where no one has to have their ideas challenged is flawed. The notion that any text that is uncomfortable should be removed from the classroom is sickening. One step I am making toward challenging current prejudice structures of the system is teaching students that it is ok to be troubled by a text. The inherent nature of informational texts is that they intrude on our lives. To ignore troubling topics is to pretend society is in perfect condition.

I think “troubled by a text” should be added to the Distinguished section of our TPEP rubrics. I’d be interested to see which texts are “troubling” your students (and their parents?) the most? I always find it interesting that parents will object to To Kill a Mockingbird and House on Mango Street but never to Romeo and Juliet…

“Raghava KK (and also this former Administrator of the Year) spoke about how schools do a disservice to students and teachers when planning is parent-centered.”
I would go a step further and say that schools serve school boards on which parents serve. In a former district I witnessed first-hand the difficult balance a superintendent must have between the school board and the district. Sadly, without term limits, school board members can serve long periods of time and a district becomes mired in whatever the board deems important. I’ve watched school boards make decisions that affect kids in a negative fashion and superintendents, whose contract renewal depends upon making the board happy, powerless to prevent it. Having taught under a board that ‘gets it’ I can attest to the positive outcome this has on students. It can make all the difference.

A very interesting read. I find myself stuck in a spot where I want to meet students where they are and be creative (using vlogs, tweets, emoji messages, etc.) and thinking about the archaic nature of higher education.

For every innovation/step that primary and secondary schools make, Universities are 2 or 10 steps behind… so how do we integrate the current ways that students communicate and still prepare them for the rigor of college classes and the MLA/APA citation papers that students must use to show their understanding?

SO TRUE. Why is this? In fact it’s those clutching their 5 paragraph essays and lessons on MLA format that are claiming–and it’s true!–that these are the skills that students will need in college. Maybe our WA Teacher Leader cadre should be expanded to include professors???